About

Hi! I'm so glad you found your way to my blog. I began malborkmalbork as a visual journal when I was traveling for a year, volunteering on a lot of farms and living in a fabled Paris bookstore. Now I live in Brooklyn and I recently completed my first novel, The Ash Family, about an off-the-grid homestead in the mountains of North Carolina (inspired by many true-life experiences). The novel will be published by Simon and Schuster in spring 2019. You can read about it and pre-order it here.

What cameras do you use?
I bring along three while traveling:

Definitely my favorite one is my Canon Ae-1. Good things about it: takes amazing film photos, even in low light, it's an SLR so you can control what you want to focus on/how much light you want, and it's very sturdy. Bad things: it's heavy and film can get very very expensive (I've had luck developing film every place I've been, but Norway was the absolute worst because of cost). Photos from the Canon include these (and most others on my blog).

My other film camera is an Olympus Stylus Epic. It's a little, lightweight, pocket-sized point and shoot camera that tends to take terrific photos, but sometimes the autofocus focuses wrong, which is sad. Until I was 21 I only used the Olympus Stylus Epic and had no complaints. (Then I got my Canon Ae-1.) I still use it when I don't want to carry around so much weight. And it took these photos, for example, which I really like.

Then I got this great little digital camera, specifically for travel. It's called a Sony DSC RX 100. I admit that I know nothing about digital photography at all, and it's not my main interest. So I wanted something tiny and lightweight that would take good pictures. Because of my grant, I could afford to splurge a little. This review from the New York Times convinced me that this was the right camera. And I really love having it--it takes really nice pictures and really, really nice video, so I could make little videos like this one. And, unlike film, I got to see my photos right away, which was fun when I was living in such remote places.

(For my photos for Fusion, I use a digital Canon EOS 60D. But I don't bring it to travel.)

Here's my post on how I edit phone photos for Instagram.

How can I live at Shakespeare and Company Bookshop in Paris?
There's no one answer, but I answered some common questions in the comments section of this post.

How could you afford to travel?
I was really fortunate to get a post-graduate fellowship to travel to Norway to interview farmers about their experiences with climate change. But I stretched my money out in various ways, described here, especially by volunteering on organic farms via WWOOF, which I talk about here.

Where do you live?

I was born and raised in Durham, North Carolina, and I currently live in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

Do you like Brooklyn College's Fiction MFA program?

Yes. A wonderful sanctuary with a deliberately non-competitive approach.

What does "malbork malbork" mean?
When I started my Flickr account a while ago I named it after my favorite chapter in Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, "Outside the town of Malbork." I thought it made sense to name my blog the same thing, but just malbork was already taken, so I doubled it. I like that it resembles the nickname my sister calls me (molldek). I haven't been to the famous Polish castle.